I find this a rather hard book to talk about because not very much happens. This is certainly not a plot-driven book, ironic when you consider the closest genre for placement would probably be thriller. And I can't call a character-driven book. In fact, it took me a while to get into it as the rapid switching of viewpoint between the two main characters held them at arm's length for a while (although I eventually became quite heavily invested in them).

I think I'd describe it as an idea-driven book, touching on cultural trends, memes and behaviors. When you look at Gibson's work as a whole, this isn't a departure. While his stories range from cyberpunk to steampunk to action, there's an underlying awareness and perspective on our culture that is very dominant.

I think the best description of what it felt like to read this book is the blurb on the back from Time: "...writing about the present as if it were the future." That's exactly the sense I had. It felt like speculative fiction but, when I stopped to think about it, everything in the story could exist today. ( )

omg, what the hell? This book is the result of William Gibson getting interested in the concept of fashion, I think. I dunno, probably his most accessible in terms of the way his main character is written but pretty much no substantial plot/good ideas....

While there is still a heavy dose of the off-beat cultural and technological references, this book seemed to spend a bit more time devoted to fleshing out the major characters and establishing what is making them tick. You can take this to apply to the case of a once monolithic inscrutable corporation which ends up being sent off along a new trajectory by the end of it all. The reader has to pay attention to what's going on or risk getting rather lost along the way, what with all the threads that are in play simultaneously.

Is this third book in the Bigend series the last one? My hunch is that it will be, but I won't be upset if Gibson proves me wrong. ( )

This flatness is the strangest feature of the world of Zero History, and more generally of the trilogy it completes. There's no question that, taken together, these three books represent one of the first great novels of 21st-century data culture. But there's no dirt in view – no muss. The cities of Neuromancer were crumbling into a kipple of obsolete technology, litter and grime. Cyberspace – clean, rational, clutterless – offered an alternative reality for those with the skills and the technology to gain access, while the wealthy could escape to exclusive orbital country-club cantons. Now that the future is here, Gibson's readers, like his protagonists, seem condemned to cities that are all surface, while yearning for a glimpse of something seedier, stickier, more troubling.

Inchmale hailed a cab for her, the kind that had always been black, when she'd first known this city.

Quotations

"But that's exactly it. Because they 'understand all that', they won't find the edge. They won't find the new. And worse, they'll trample on it, inadvertently crush it, beneath a certain mediocrity inherent in professional competence." [Hubertus Bigend: 24]

Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug. [Milgrim: 93]

She always found it peculiar to encounter a time she had actually lived through rendered as a period. It made her wonder whether she was living through another one, and if so, what it would be called. [Hollis Henry: 102]

There was something inherently cheerful about the buoyancy of a balloon, he thought. It must have been a wonderful day when they first discovered buoyant gases. He wondered what they'd put them in. Varnished silk, he guessed, for some reason picturing the courtyard at the Salon du Vintage. [Milgrim: 376]

Last words

She wakes beside Garreth's slow breathing, in their darkened room, the sheets against her skin.

Wikipedia in English (2)

Former rock singer Hollis Henry and ex-addict Milgrim, an accomplished linguist, are at the front line of a sinister proprietor's attempts to get a slice of the military budget. When a Department of Defense contract for combat-wear turns out to be the gateway drug for arms dealers, they gradually realize their employer has some very dangerous competitors--including Garreth, a ruthless ex-military officer with lots of friends. Set largely in London after our post-Crash times.… (more)